The personal blog of Dave Fernig, thoughts on science and unrelated matters

Open access and sci-hub: stumbling into the future

This post assembles various comments I have posted and other thoughts on sci-hub and access to the scientific literature. It finishes with some ideas about what we should consider keeping and some of my better experiences, as a consumer and producer of the scientific literature.

Some time between clay tablet and the PDF

Once upon a time manuscripts were hand written, double spaced (fountain pen as ever outperforming all other tools), graphs transferred to tracing paper using a rotoring pen and Letraset (also alive and well) used for symbols. Gels etc., were given to the experts, the photographic service department or the departmental photographer, microscopes would have a 35 mm SLR. PhD students knew how to develop film and print. Science journal publishers earned their keep, employing skilled people who did a lot of hard work, shifting a typescript and figures into hot metal and a printed page, with real production editing and proofing along the way. In the days of hot metal, we gave away copyright, as this was either to a Learned Society or to a commercial publisher who was not so different from a learned society, and the publishers contributed to making the paper.

Now

That has changed. Production is automated, from submitted files to PDF and apart from a few cases, copy editing and proof reading are minimal to non-existent. The latter point is clearly evidenced on reading any article, the simplest of language errors that would have merited copy editing in the past abound.

While production costs have fallen through the floor (cost of staff >> software and hardware), subscription costs have for over two decades risen well above inflation, often in double digits per year. Profits for many (note Learned Societies have generally kept the lid on rises) science publishers are stunning, only matched by a few individual companies in a couple of other sectors. So the input of publishers has shrunk, but there has been no commensurate reduction in the cost of the output; instead it has risen well above inflation for many commercial publishers.

So access costs barrowloads of cash and many need access. The past 50 years has seen a massive increase in the level of education, a democratisation of science and increasing involvement of the public. One example of many is Patient Public Involvement in UK NIHR-funded research. Researchers themselves have trouble accessing the literature – the University of Liverpool spends millions on subscriptions, but there is still a substantial swathe of the literature that is not on tap. While there are mechanisms for access, including by scientists in countries with fewer resources, experience of the latter mechanisms is not good, to the extent that they don’t access. This I know from experience, when I travel, I am often asked for PDFs of my entire set of publications. These go into a local research group repository. I also often pass on a library of PDFs on a subject of mutual interest. Access is a problem for the entire community: a large proportion of the major users of Sci-Hub are located in the world’s richest country. So access is clearly a problem and anger is understandable and justified.

Archiving service?

Science publishing is changing and the large publishing houses may disappear in the next few decades. Perhaps we should view Sci-Hub as an archiving service. After all who will look after the back catalogues of publishing houses should they go to the wall?

Learned Societies

This leaves the vexatious question of learned society journals. They are clearly experimenting, some are more progressive than others and those I know well support science in 101 different and most useful ways. There is an argument that if our libraries did not pay for these subscriptions, then the funds would be available through the institution. However, I do not trust universities to disburse funds in the way a learned society does, rather than use them for other purposes. The temptation to raid a multimillion budget would be hard to resist for even the most upright of University Vice-Chancellors/Presidents. So publishing in one form or another is an income stream that needs to be maintained for the Learned Societies, rather than being returned to universities.

Where to next?

The published article.

This requires a serious amount of scholarship, analysis and synthesis. In my experience, writing papers is a critical part of training scientists. The finished product also looks good, and hence provides a sense of accomplishment. So the article remains in my view a valid exercise, and I think it will be retained. A question: for electronic journals, how do we maintain access as systems develop (=upgraded)?

Data.

Open data is burgeoning. The same simple question posed for papers has generally not been addressed: data maintenance. How do we read data that are 10 years old? 100 years old? Our funders (UK) only expect data to be held for a few years, which seems very short-sighted. Acid-free paper remains the most secure format, but that is a useful solution. So we need an effort to ensure the integrity of the information (paper and data) over time. One might argue that everything that is deemed important (be it right or wrong) will find its way into reviews and books and these will be printed. However, that is not necessarily the case in the long term.

The “Best” journal

This does not exist. Never did, never will. Here I highlight the positives from direct experience, which provide lessons for all.

Pricing of APCs. Subscription models I think are one way forward. These exist as “pure” subscription models, as used by PeerJ or what might be termed “hybrid” or “transitional” as practiced by the Royal Society of Chemistry. In the former open access model, authors pay all (it is cheap), though institutions can take out a subscription (University of Liverpool, when will you take out a sub??). In the latter, depending on the scale of the institutional subscription, the institution is given a number of vouchers for free Open Access. If Learned Societies teamed up with the organisations providing access to scientists in countries with fewer resources, we might be on our way to a new model for Learned Society publishing.

Transparent reviewing and decision-making. The lead has been taken by Embo Press.

No page limit. I recently reviewed a paper for a Learned Society journal that had strict page limits. The paper was incredibly difficult to follow, as the poor authors were forced to undertake the equivalent of squashing an adult bull elephant into a Mini. This doesn’t work. The argument that the science published in this journal is so important that it merits printing does not sit well against the unnecessary compression of text and figures. So publishers of electronic journals have a major advantage here – one can actually read the papers and the data.

Next steps?

Stop giving the most precious thing you have, your time, to closed access and double dipping publishers. If these are from Learned Societies, then the membership needs to get involved. Adapt or your society may perish.